Visual analytics: A sensemaking framework for systems thinking in systems engineering

Increasingly, visual analytics (VA) is playing a major role in providing insights into the relationships of complex data sets across a number of domains. This paper describes the use of VA to support systems thinking to make sense of complex systems interactions and interrelations enabling rapid modeling of the systems of interest for systems engineering design and analysis processes. This will be explained with reference to a case study, describing the data mining and the modeling of domestic water demand based on the previous consumption profile and weather forecasts. The key contribution of this research is a novel visual interactive approach to model the systems of interest behavior.